Are Catholics just stupid or are there good reasons to believe the Christian message?

Are Catholics just stupid or are there good reasons to believe the Christian message?

A homily by Fr Stephen Wang: 26th Sunday of Year A, 1st October 2017, Newman House Catholic Chaplaincy.

We had a great freshers’ party on Friday evening. Food, drink, conversation, games. I got completely wiped out at Texas Hold ‘Em – thank goodness we were not playing for real money. The student who won (she will remain anonymous) has now been moved to the bar duty team, so unfortunately she won’t be able to play next time…

In the middle of the evening, I had an amazing discussion about faith. I won’t say what the other person said, because of course it was confidential. But he was asking me about my own conversion, and what changed me from being a hardened atheist at 16 to becoming a Catholic three years later just before I went off to university myself.

Well it wasn’t one thing, and that’s the main point I was trying to get across. It was reading Shakespeare and Yeats Eliot and Larkin and having the horizons of my teenage imagination expanded. It was asking hard philosophical questions about the meaning of life and the origin of the universe. It was listening to the Bible readings in my school assembly, I remember the Prologue of St John’s Gospel – “In the beginning was the Word” – and wondering if this Word were perhaps something real and alive and personal.

It was walking in the park near our school and hearing a silence within the rustle of the leaves that was more than just an absence of sound. It was wandering into a Catholic Church on a Sunday evening, seeing the congregation kneel in adoration, and knowing that they were seeing something I couldn’t yet see. It was a friend, offering to pray for me, and then – as if that wasn’t scary enough – offering to pray with me, right there, right then…

It was all of this together that changed me – gradually seeing the world in a new way, as a place that came from God, and as a place where God could be found; glimpsing something of his goodness and truth and beauty, and ultimately, coming to see him in the face of Christ.

I say all this because the Gospel reading today hangs on a Greek single word: metamelomai. It means to change your mind. The first son in the parable does not want to work in the vineyard for his father. He goes away. But something happens; he comes back; and he enters the vineyard. Metamelomai – he changes his mind, he changes his heart – it’s a subtle word in Greek, it literally means to change the things you care about.

This is a story about moral conversion. But it’s also a story about someone taking a step of faith. And it begs the question: Why did he change his mind? Were there good reasons for his decision?

Many people today think that religious faith can have no rational foundation. It’s a matter of personal taste, like preferring KFC to McDonalds. Or it’s something you just inherit, like your surname or your ethnicity. Or it’s a lifestyle choice you buy into because of the benefits it brings like status or identity or community or cake. And even if you seem to have rational, objective reasons, many have stopped believing in the idea of truth itself; everything is relative, and your objective arguments are just another form of subjective preference.

As Catholics, as biblical Christians, we have two fundamental convictions about faith, and it’s worth spelling them out.

On the one hand, we believe that faith is beyond reason, it’s a supernatural gift. It’s something we can pray for, and indeed we should. Just to say: Lord, give me faith. Lord, help me to believe. And it’s something we can be open to – searching, listening, asking questions. It’s something we need to say Yes to: It requires both assent and action. This is what the second son in the parable lacked. To believe is a verb not a noun. But it’s always a gift. There is a sense of wonder and even surprise. Why me? I don’t deserve this.

It can come suddenly, in a dramatic conversion; or over many years, like a landscape slowly changing or a child growing to maturity.

Faith is a new way of understanding and seeing. It helps us to grasp things that are completely beyond reason, like the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation of the Son of God, the consecration of the bread and wine at Mass into the Body and Blood of Christ. You can appreciate these mysteries and see them with the eyes of faith, but you can never fully understand or explain them. God gives us a share in his own knowing, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, and this divine knowledge is so dazzling that it can sometimes seem like utter darkness to us.

Faith is a gift. OK.

On the other hand, there are very good reasons to believe. We are not “fideists”. A fideist – from the Latin word for faith – is someone who thinks faith is completely blind, a step in the dark; you just have to accept everything uncritically and without any rational foundation. You switch off the brain. I’m giving a talk at King’s on Thursday, and the title is simply: “Are Christians just stupid?” The sad thing is, if you admit you are Catholic, some people – you can see it in their eyes – will actually assume that you are stupid, that you have no brain.

For Catholics, faith is reasonable, even if it takes us further than reason. There are good reasons to believe. I wouldn’t call this proof, like 2+2=4. I prefer to use the word evidence, that helps you piece together a clearer picture of the truth over time. In a court of law you can hear enough evidence to reach a conclusion that is beyond reasonable doubt.

There is so much evidence out there – about the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, the power of prayer, the holiness of the saints – that it should make a rational person stop and think and at least be open to the possibility that this is true. The Church speaks about the credibility of Christian faith. Faith is believable, credible. And the New Testament often speaks about signs and seeing: people see the miracles that Jesus performed, they are astonished by his teaching, his love, and his kindness and beauty. These people are not stupid – there are sound reasons for their belief. And in the Gospel today Jesus criticises those who see the signs yet refuse to believe.

This is so important for you as young Catholic students. Don’t switch your brain off when it comes to questions of faith. You are studying subjects of such complexity, at some of the finest universities in the world. You need to bring the same intelligence to your Catholic faith that you bring to your studies. You need to know, first of all, what we actually believe as Catholics, and sort out the rumours and myths from the reality. You need to know why we believe what we believe – there are good reasons! You need to bring your hard questions and doubts to a place where they can be explored and hopefully answered, over time. Never be afraid of asking honest questions. If your questions are sincere, and if the Catholic faith is true – which it is – then eventually you will find a way to bring your life and faith together, without betraying one or the other. And if that takes time, don’t give up; be patient; be humble; trust in God and in his Church.

You do all this for yourself – you deserve some clear thinking. But you also do it for others: your friends need you to have some solid answers for them when they ask you questions. You may not be Einstein or Thomas Aquinas, but you are an ordinary intelligent person who needs to have ordinary intelligent answers. In his first letter St Peter says: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have”. St Peter doesn’t say that we have to prove that our Christian faith is true; we just have to say why we believe, and to show that we have good reasons for our faith, even if they don’t convince the other person.

Do you know what really freaks people out? It’s when they meet a normal, happy, intelligent young Catholic. That’s it. Last week we had the “hello challenge” – you had to say hello to as many people as possible, with a big reward for the winner. This week we have the “normal, happy, intelligent Catholic” challenge – for the student who manages to be normal, happy, and intelligently Catholic for seven consecutive days. This is difficult. Normal, mmm… that’s going to be a struggle for most of you. Happy – well that comes and goes. But intelligently Catholic – we can work on that.

I’m going to finish with a practical suggestion. How can you grow in your faith this year? Well as you know we have a big programme of prayer [click here] and activities [click here] taking place at the Chaplaincy this semester.

But in particular we have five courses running this semester as part of the Newman House formation programme. My suggestion is that you choose one of them as a way of deepening your faith, and really commit to it. The programme is carefully designed so that there is something for everyone.

Tuesday at 6pm – Catholic Apologetics [click here]: How to understand your faith and explain it to others, in 59 minutes. Tuesday at 7.30pm – Unlocking the Mystery of the Bible [click here], a wonderful 8 week course that opens up the meaning of the whole Bible. Wednesday at 6pm – A Faith Sharing Group [click here], where you can talk about your own faith, your own experiences, in a supportive and prayerful group, to grow in friendship and faith together. Wednesday at 7.30pm – Ways of Praying [click here], a very practical course, every two weeks, about different methods of praying. Often we want to pray but we simply don’t know how; no-one has taught us. This will fill the gap. Thursday at 7pm, starting on 26th October, the Alpha Course [click here] – the very basics of the Christian faith, what we believe and why; for you as a refresher course, or for your friends who are just exploring.

Those are the options. What do you need most? What would you enjoy most? Apologetics, Bible, Faith Sharing, Prayer, the Basics of Christianity. Think about it, and see if you can commit to one. And if you are not sure, you can go all in (that’s a poker term that has a particularly painful resonance for me after last night’s game): you can come to all five this courses this week and make a decision at the end. There will be another prize for anyone who manages that.

About this blog

Looking across the landscape of contemporary culture - at the arts, science, religion, politics, philosophy; sorting through the jumble; seeing what stands out, what unsettles, what intrigues, what connects, what sheds light. Father Stephen Wang is a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Westminster, London. He is currently Senior University Chaplain, based at Newman House Catholic Chaplaincy. [Banner photo with kind permission of Matthew Powell]

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